Orange’s approach to fighting spam includes filtering on both the reputation of the sender and email content. Using the Vade Filter Engine along with Cloudmark’s Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) and blocklist allows Orange to aggressively protect their customers from spam.
Luckily, Orange has a good public escalation process in place that can assist you in your troubleshooting efforts. Prior to escalating your delivery problem, ensure you are following their best practice guidelines and have made an effort to identify and fix the cause of your delivery issue.
Write to abuse@orange.fr describing exactly what delivery issues you are experiencing. Be sure to provide as much detail as possible including your company name, domains, IP addresses, subject lines, error codes and timestamps.
Troubleshooting tips
- Check your consent method for all Orange subscribers. Sending to Orange subscribers that did not give consent to receive your email results in filtering or blocks. Orange recommends using confirmed opt-in (COI) for all Orange subscribers.
- Determine if Orange subscribers are complaining about your email. Ensure your IPs are signed up on the Signal Spam complaint feedback loop.
- Senders participating in Validity’s Certification program receive Signal Spam FBL data upon request.
- Orange counts the number of complaints per IP. When an IP hits more than 3000 complaints (per day, regardless the volume of the sender) a warning is triggered and the block on IP (and in some cases domain) is manually put in place.
- Determine if your campaign was filtered by Vade. Analyze your bounce messages and check the email header to confirm if it is due to Vade.
- Check the status of the header X-ME-spam level. The spam level can be ‘not spam’, low, medium or high. If you see anything other than ‘not spam’ then the Vade Filter Engine has flagged your email as spam.
- There is an additional header called “X-ME-spam cause”. If the value in this first bracket is higher than 100, then Vade has flagged your mail as spam.
- Write an email to abuse@vade-retro.com with your company name, sending IP addresses and domains, an explanation of the situation, and the complete email in attachment.
- Prior to contacting Vade, attempt to identify and fix the cause of the issue.
- Check if your IP address is listed on the Spamhaus Zen blocklist.
- Perform an IP address lookup and follow the directions given by Spamhaus to help you identify and fix the cause if your IP is listed.
- Review your SMTP logs for error codes referencing the Cloudmark Sender Intelligence (CSI) blocklist.
- Request an IP reputation reset once you have identified and fixed the cause of the issue.
- Check your SMTP bounce logs. Orange has stated that when a legitimate marketer sends messages that are rejected, they notify the marketer of the rejection. The marketer can then contact abuse@orange.fr to get more information and to report a false positive. Keep in mind that Orange may reject your email for legitimate reasons and contacting their abuse desk does not guarantee the block will be lifted.
- Bounce logs can also help you identify if Orange is throttling your email.
- The 3 authorized simultaneous connections have to be shared between these 2 domains; for example: 2 for Orange.fr domain and 1 for wanadoo.fr.
- Do not request more than a 1000 connections per hour.
- Send over a 100 emails per open connection.
- Ensure your Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record includes all your sending IP addresses and doesn’t contain any syntax errors. Kitterman has a good SPF testing tool you can use to validate your SPF record.
